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"Who should control California's prison budget? U.S. Supreme Court may weigh in"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the headline of this new article in the Los Angeles Times.  It gets started this way: A legal battle over who gets to control California's massive spending on prisons ? judges or corrections officials ? may be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, with overcrowding at the state's 33 prisons at the center of the debate. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state officials have challenged an edict from three federal judges that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation must cut the prison population by 40,000, or about a quarter of its 165,000 inmates. The judges' order, issued last August, cited overcrowding as the main cause of healthcare failures that amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and left inmates to die from treatable conditions at the rate of one per week...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on June 13, 2010 (boomark / email).